In chronic pain, normal life seems to recede into the distance while the world of pain becomes incredibly close, immediate, and demanding. Pain becomes our experience of life.

This can create an immense sense of loss which often becomes an overall, pervasive sadness at having had our lives completely immersed in living with, dealing with, and trying to get through pain. This sadness and sense of loss is something we don't often share with others, and it's not always something we even admit to ourselves.

We tend to just live with it. Or we don't recognize it for what it is. It just seems go come with the whole package of living with pain.

Living Outside of Time

The time spent in pain can feel like lost time because we cannot attend or participate in many important events, or must do so from within our aura of pain.

The sense of sadness and loss is not only of the time and experiences that are eaten up by pain, but also includes a feeling of losing dreams and goals, as if our connection to the future is also being consumed by pain as well.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a formula for recovering time that’s been lost to pain, but, over the years, I have found some things that have helped me mitigate the sense of sadness that comes from living with long-term pain.

Pain Is The Landscape You're Passing Through

One day I woke up and realized I didn’t have a sense of a personal future anymore. I had simply stopped dreaming because it seemed like my life was just going to be an endless stream of days in pain. So, to help me get through this, I started to think of pain as a landscape that had edges. It had had a beginning, therefore it must have an end. Somewhere.

The pain landscape was nasty, ugly, and burned out, but it was only a landscape, a place I was walking through, not the entire world. I told myself over and over that I I was just passing through this, and I would eventually reach gentler and more beautiful landscapes. (And, in time, I have.) This helped restore a sense of having a future.

Valuing Life, No Matter What

Instead of being life lost, I began to think of the time spent in pain as equally as valuable and important an aspect of my human journey as my life outside of pain, even if I couldn’t yet completely see how.

When I went in search for the gifts in the ashes, I realized that living in pain had given me valuable insights. I had gained greater awareness of what others suffer, and greater compassion for others, as well. And for myself. I developed a fuller sense of gratitude for all the relationships in my life, and a deeper appreciation for my body.

Feeling It Comes First

Feelings of sadness and loss are natural responses to living with chronic pain, but we're so used to having to keep it all together and try to buck up while we're in pain, that we don't always allow ourselves to feel the emotional repercussions of living with all that physical pain.

So, for me, recognizing that I was feeling a quiet, but constant, sense of sadness and loss without even realizing it - that these emotions were somehow intertwined with the sensations of being in pain - was a helpful first step in addressing them, and allowing them to release.

Then I worked with choosing other ways to think about what was happening in my life. When it feels like life in pain is meaningless, I remind myself that it is I who chooses the meaning my life has.

I can decide that I have wasted or lost the years I have been in pain, or I can choose to see them as years with a different kind of meaning, sometimes surprisingly rich and deep despite the pain and, sometimes, as much as I don't always want to admit it, because of it.

Coming to grips with the fact that we’re living in long-term pain can be incredibly challenging and distressing. To help make sense of it, we tell ourselves stories about what it all means.

That’s not a bad thing if it gets us through another day. But sometimes we get stuck in our story and can’t get to the next step or level in healing. Getting stuck can make us think there may not be a next step, or a next anything.

Here are some of the common tales we tell ourselves, and thoughts on how to get unstuck when they stop serving their purpose.

It's Only A Flesh Wound

This is often the first story we tell ourselves, sometimes even when we’re in pretty dire straits. It’s extremely hard to accept a severe or long-term illness or injury as a reality, and we feel that if we let that truth in, we will be letting the pain win. We’ll be making it more real.

But we can’t stay in denial forever if we want to move on in life. We have to face our situation head on, even if it means accepting the fact that moving forward means we are moving forward with pain for a time. Maybe a long time.

Keep My Seat, I'll Be Right Back

This is another flavor of denial that we often adopt once we’ve accepted that maybe whatever we’re dealing with is more than a “flesh wound.” So, we tell ourselves that it may look bad, but it will be over soon. Not a terrible thing to believe, of course - it's a way of staying positive.

On the other hand, if we sit in this story overly long, we may be avoiding some things we really need to deal with: That life has changed, that we may need to make some accommodations for the pain we’re living with, that we may have to look at how pain is affecting our work life and our relationships over the long haul.

We may also be ignoring medical or alternative approaches that could really help us because we’re choosing the story that we’re not going to be doing this for long, so there’s no need to develop a long-term plan for living with pain.

It's kind of a tricky business - how to create a story that is both positive and realistic at the same time. We want to believe there's hope for moving beyond this soon, at the same time that we avoid ignoring what really does need to be dealt with right now.

The Answer Is Just Around The Corner

This story is about the belief that there is one final all-encompassing miracle cure to find and then everything will be all right.

When we tell ourselves this tale, we could be missing out on all the small, but important, things we can do right now to increase our well being because we’re absorbed with searching for the one true answer: Rest a lot, drink a lot of water, eat healthfully, laugh more, stay as stress free as possible, stay connected with friends, journal or make music or dance to express what we are going through and not let it pool up inside.

We don't have to let go of hope for new developmnets and possibilities on the horizon, of course, but we also want to remember that healing is an everyday kind of thing that often happens in small increments over time.

There Is No Answer

This is the story we tell ourselves when we’re discouraged. When we haven’t find the answer after months and years of searching, we might decide that there really isn’t any answer at all for us, and that we are lost in our pain forever. We might then conclude that we just have to live with the pain in a state of resignation. We lose hope and stop moving toward answers and start to dig in for the long haul.

This is when we need to remind ourselves that there is probably no single answer to chronic pain, that the answer is – no matter how hard this can be to accept and live with – what we are living day by day. Our life has to become the answer, even as we keep open to new possibilities for recovering more of our functionality and more of ourselves as we move forward in life.

Pain Is Bigger Than Me

Another common tale is that pain is bigger than we are. It is so all encompassing, so demanding, and so ever-present that it can begin to feel like it has taken over our whole world.

Yes, it may be everywhere we go right now, but it is not the totality of who we are.

We want to be careful not to confuse ourselves with our pain, and to remember to find ways to experience pleasures and joys alongside of it wherever we can.Pain is an unpleasant experience we’re having, but it is within our experience of life, and it is not all of life or all of us.

Stories That Heal

Sometimes the story we tell ourselves is the only way to get up in the morning or to make it through the day, but sometimes the story is what’s keeping us stuck. I guess the question to ask is, how is my pain story serving me? Is there something I can change in it that will lead to a greater sense of hope, well-being, and renewal? Then we can choose to create a different tale to tell ourselves.

Maybe it becomes the story of how healing isn’t some unknown point in the future, dependent upon one right answer, but what we do everyday. It becomes the story of finding ourselves again when we thought we were lost in the pain, and the story of allowing our healing to take the time it needs while maintaining the balance between acceptance of our current limitations and positive action toward a less painful future.

It becomes a story that focuses more on where we’re headed than what’s wrong right now. And it’s a story we’re free to modify, enlarge, or swap out for a new one as soon as it becomes outdated or restrictive.

Disclaimer

Nothing on this website constitutes medical advice and is not intended to be a substitute for the medical advice of physicians. The reader should consult a physician in matters relating to his or her health and particularly with respect to any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.